Gordon Ramsay’s gift to The Trolley Stop included a deconstructed ‘po-boy’

Around lunchtime on Oct. 23, 2018, I craved a baked potato. So I headed to a diner where I could count on getting one: The Trolley Stop Café on St. Charles Avenue. I didn’t know it until I got there, but that Tuesday just so happened to be the day after the restaurant had reopened after it was renovated and transformed into something I wasn’t expecting. There was a new décor that gave the diner the impression of actually being aboard a streetcar, and there was a new menu — greatly reduced to just a single page — that included everything the restaurant was offering for breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert.

When I expressed dismay on Facebook that Trolley Stop had been changed into something I didn’t recognize, one of my Facebook friends commented with two words: Gordon Ramsay.

Indeed, the celebrity chef’s show “24 Hours to Hell and Back” will have its season premier Wednesday (Jan. 2) at 7 p.m. on WVUE-FOX 8, and the makeover of The Trolley Stop will be featured. A preview shows Ramsay visiting the restaurant disguised as an Orleans Parish sheriff’s deputy. He finds the food so disgusting that he spits out his bite of oyster po-boy into a napkin and orders the people at his table to not eat anything else.

According to the show’s website, “GORDON RAMSAY’S 24 HOURS TO HELL AND BACK features Ramsay driving to struggling restaurants across the country in his state-of-the-art mobile kitchen and command center, Hell On Wheels…. Ramsay tries to bring each of these failing restaurants back from the brink of disaster — all in just 24 hours. First, he sends in a team to record secret surveillance. Then, he goes in undercover to see the problems first-hand. As the clock ticks down, Ramsay and his team transform these restaurants with spectacular renovations, fresh new menus and hope for the future.”

Having never seen the show, I can’t say how successful Ramsay has been in his attempts to makeover other restaurants, but if his Trolley Stop makeover is typical of his work, then put me down as skeptical. I can’t possibly know how Ramsay’s bite of oyster po-boy tasted, but I can look at the video and tell he was eating a po-boy. When I arrived at Trolley Stop after Ramsay had brought it back from alleged disaster, the waitress spent a considerable amount of time assuring me that the catfish po-boy on the menu was really a po-boy. Which was odd because I hadn’t expressed any concern that it wouldn’t be.

Why didn’t I take her insistence that it was a po-boy as a sign?

She soon brought to my table a plate with a few catfish fillets, two slices of tomato, some iceberg lettuce and two pieces of wheat toast sliced into triangles.

A po-boy deconstructed. And not with French bread, but with toast. “Why would you deconstruct it?” a Facebook friend decried. “It is the epitome of itself as is!”

Again, having never seen Ramsay’s show, I can’t say if what happened in October at Trolley Stop typifies what he’s done in other places, but as another friend who saw a picture of my plate of food wrote, “This is disrespectful.”

For quite some time now, the opinion writers for NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune have been asked to think about and write about the tension between progress and preservation in and around New Orleans. However, I don’t think any of us could have conceived that some big shot from out of town could come into New Orleans, declare an actual po-boy disgusting and then leave behind a menu describing a catfish platter as a po-boy.

Not every change counts as progress. Some things don’t need updating. I think we can all agree that the po-boy is one thing that doesn’t.

You can get a sense of how upsetting the changes were just by reading The Trolley Stop’s Facebook page. In late October, management acknowledged that customers were upset at the shorter menu and promised that they’d be making it longer. On Nov. 3, the restaurant promised, “Certain omelettes and more seafood options will be returning next week!” On Nov. 15: “New menu is in full effect! All the old favorites are back!”

But a couple days after that, I read a mournful Facebook post from a Baton Rouge man who complained that the restaurant didn’t feel as welcoming as it once had. Something was different.

Ramsay will no doubt boast about those differences; he’ll say he came into New Orleans and left a struggling restaurant better than he found it. Just know, though, that not everybody will agree.

I don’t want to be one of those New Orleanians who’s reflexively suspicious of change. I don’t want to be one of those people who disregards and dismisses any recommendation made by someone who isn’t native to New Orleans. But in the midst of so much change, I want some things to stay familiar. At the very least, I want to be able to trust that a po-boy is and always will be a po-boy.

UPDATE: According to Robyn Bartman, The Trolley Stop’s social media manager, Oct. 23, the day I visited the restaurant, was the one day the restaurant didn’t receive its delivery of Leidenheimer bread. That explains my po-boy that wasn’t a po-boy she said. “We are so sorry that you came on that day and were not explained the situation better.” I still don’t understand why if The Trolley Stop was out of French bread that day, the waitress wouldn’t just say po-boys weren’t available. The day after a major change strikes me as the absolute worst time to pretend that a catfish platter is a po-boy.

Jarvis DeBerry is a columnist on the Latitude team at NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. Latitude is a place to share opinions about the challenges facing Louisiana. Follow @LatitudeNOLA on Facebook and Twitter. Write Jarvis at jdeberry@nola.com or @jarvisdeberry.